#pitdark

Disgraced clergyman of the Church of the Eternal Mysteries Dr. William Savage is illegally resurrected by his estranged wife after being murdered in jail, where he was serving time for propositioning his congregants. While Dr. William Savage struggles to return to his normal life without the institutional support he enjoyed before, he takes on odd jobs to supplement his income by offering to be a guide for wealthy tourists. One of his clients, Mr. Lamus Basil Maddox, is revealed to be a spy from a competing world power. Maddox tries to implicate Dr. Savage in his espionage by making a bet with him to see whose model of ethics will change the world first. As the novel progresses, war begins to overwhelm Dr. Savage's humble plans to find equilibrium after death. Originally inspired by books from the French Decadence, it's a good fit for fans of Tamsyn Muir's Gideon the Ninth, S.T. Gibson's A Dowry of Blood or Vajra Chandrasekera's The Saint of Bright Doors. The Death Cleric features critical deconstruction of traditional fantasy tropes about curses, gods and monarchies by re-imagining family curses as equivalent to nuclear weapons, immortal aristocrats who are literally out of touch with their modern times, and gods as a knot of loose associations that may not be sentient.